In ‘The House at Pooh Corner’ by A.A. Milne, Rabbit asks Winnie the Pooh if he has made up a song.  Winnie the Pooh replies that he “sort of made it up”.  He tells Rabbit that it isn’t “Brain” and explains that it comes to him sometimes.  Rabbit doesn’t really understand, because Rabbit is the sort of person who doesn’t let things come to him, but always goes and fetches them.  But I do understand what Winnie the Pooh means, because sometimes songs just seem to come to me.

In many ways I think I am more like Rabbit; I like to plan what I do rather than letting things happen.  I am conscientious and I would like to be in control of what is going on in my life.

After all that has happened, I know that that is not how it works, because things happen that we can’t control.  We just have to cope with them the best way that we can.   However I do like to plan things, and then I try to fit them all in.  This isn’t always a good idea as then I can get tired and stressed!

When I was at school and then at college I used to make up poems and songs to try to express how I felt about the things that happened in my life.  I made up tunes to go with words that I liked, but I never wrote them down; they were just in my head.  At college we had to keep a journal and I got in the habit of writing things down: descriptions, accounts and stories, poems or songs; they were not for others to look at, but just a way of trying to express myself.  After college, when Sharon was little, I did an Open University course and I know I kept on writing poems and songs because I used to write them on the spare pages of the course books.  They were about the way I was feeling at the time – very isolated; it seemed that there was no-one I could talk to about how I felt, so I put some of those feelings into songs.